When I was at Atrenta, we always thought it would be great to do as-you-type RTL linting. It’s the natural use model for anyone used to writing text in virtually any modern application (especially on the Web, thanks to Google spell and grammar-checks). You may argue that you create your RTL in Vi or EMACS and you don’t need no stinking… Read More
When you think of a DSP IP, you tend to think of very targeted applications – for baseband signal processing or audio or vision perhaps. Whatever the application, sometimes you want a solution optimally tuned to that need: best possible performance and power in the smallest possible footprint. These needs will continue,… Read More
Formal verification for hardware was stuck for a long time with a reputation of being interesting but difficult to use and consequently limited to niche applications. Jasper worked hard to change this, particularly with their apps for JasperGold and I have been seeing more anecdotal information that mainstream adoption is growing.… Read More
Big Data techniques have become important in many domains, not just to drive marketing strategies but also for semiconductor design, as evidenced by Ansys’ recent announcements around their use of Big Data analytics. And they should become even more important in the brave new world of the IoT. So it makes sense to look at an organization… Read More
My brother Sean is working on post-doctoral research in linguistics, especially the use of language in Shakespeare’s plays. Which may seem like a domain far removed from the interests of the technologists who read these blogs, but stick with me. This connects in unexpected ways to analytics of interest to us techies, and ultimately… Read More
In the largest and fastest growing categories in electronics – mobile, IoT and automotive – analog is playing an increasingly important role. It’s important in delivering high integrity power and critical signals to the design though LDO regulators and PLLs, in managing high speed interfaces like DDR and SERDES, in interfacing… Read More
When automakers are thinking about the safety of an embedded system in a car, while it’s good to know the hardware has been comprehensively tested for safety-specific requirements, that isn’t much help if the software component of the system is not supplied with similarly robust guarantees.
The challenge is that the software … Read More
UVM for developing testbenches is a wonderful thing, as most verification engineers will attest. It provides abstraction capabilities, it encapsulates powerful operations, it simplifies and unifies constrained-random testing – it has really revolutionized the way we verify at the block and subsystem level.
However great… Read More
There has been a startling rise in a class of Android auto-rooting malware which is believed to affect over a quarter of a million phones in the US and well over a million in each of India and China. The attack has primarily infected older versions of Android (so far) – KitKat, JellyBean and Lolipop primarily.
The malware, known as Shedun… Read More
In the back-and-forth competition between Samsung and Apple, the Galaxy S7 certainly seems to have notched a few wins over the iPhone 6S. Most reviewers feel the Samsung camera is noticeably superior and the overall look and feel is on a par with or better than the Apple product. I want to focus on just one area where Samsung differs… Read More
